Most Americans do this
without a second thought.
But just 20 minutes outside of New York city, in Mount Vernon,
you'll find sewage backing up into people's homes.
This is what the basement looks like,
that bubbling there is water coming up out of the sewer.
And it's not just a Mount Vernon problem.
All throughout the United States, inadequate sanitation disrupts people's lives far too often.
Today more than one million Americans don't have access to complete indoor plumbing which
means they might not have running water or they could be missing a sink or flush toilet or shower.
And it's a problem that disproportionately affects communities of color.
Black and Latino households are nearly twice as likely to lack indoor plumbing as white ones.
Native Americans nearly 19 times more likely.
So why is it that in one of the wealthiest countries
in the world some people can't access something as fundamental as safe and reliable sanitation.
Sewage systems have been around in some way shape or form for thousands of years
and societies without proper sewage systems quickly learned why they're needed.
For example, in 1854 a cholera epidemic killed hundreds of people in London's Soho neighborhood.
The outbreak was later traced back to a single water pump contaminated with sewage.
Water-borne diseases also reached the US which face its own outbreaks of cholera and typhoid in the 19th century.
American cities gradually improved sanitation by building centralized sewers and treatment plants
and by the end of the century most major US cities had some form of sewage system.
Sanitation progress continued into the 20th century.
In 1950, 27 of Americans didn't have complete plumbing.
By 1970 that number plummeted to just under 6%.
And in 1972, the clean water act was passed, making funding available for wastewater infrastructure.
But racist policies often excluded people of color from this progress.
For example, in 1954 the city of Zanesville, Ohio, built a water line that stopped just short of
a predominantly black neighborhood called Coal Run.
This is a map of what water access look in the area.
Households with water access are shown in blue.
Those without water access, located primarily in Coal Run, are shown in gray.
Black citizens in Coal Run spent decades
requesting access to the water supply but various government authorities denied those requests,
all the while granting access to white residents on the same street.
Another example, throughout the
20th century, California's farm worker communities didn't receive the same level of investment as
wealthy or wider urban areas, leaving them unable to become official incorporated cities with their
own local governments.
So when infrastructure funding became available in the latter half of
the century, these unincorporated communities weren't eligible to get a cut of that money.
Yet another example, in the 1970s and 80s, the US passed landmark environmental laws that funded
massive upgrades to water and sewage infrastructure but native American nations
were not initially eligible for this funding and they still face barriers to accessing funds today.
Making matters worse for excluded communities, the funding landscape for sanitation upgrades
has shifted significantly.
In 1977, the federal government played a huge part in helping
communities pay for their water and wastewater systems but when communities who were left out
tried to catch up nearly 40 years later, the federal government had basically moved on.
This is Veronica Reyes Ibarra.
In July 2019, Veronica received a letter saying that she
may have been infected with a potentially deadly parasite called strongeoloides and she wasn't the
only one – 15 of her neighbors received the exact same test result.
Veronica and her sister Monica live in a tiny Texas community called Rancho Vista.
Rancho Vista doesn't have sewer lines and instead relies on underground septic tanks to collect wastewater.
In theory, that wastewater is supposed to degrade and seep into the ground,
the problem is the soil in Rancho Vista isn't right for that kind of system which
leads residents to deal with sewage problems and the health risks that come with them.
Researchers studying Rancho Vista believe the strongyloides cluster is related to sanitary system failures.
Veronica's sister Monica says these issues have been ignored in their community
because it's predominantly low-income and Mexican-American.
Residents of the majority black town of Mount Vernon, New York, have faced similar sanitation issues.
Deja Torsha has seen raw sewage regularly flood her home for about 10 years.
It's a pretty common problem in the city because its wastewater runs
through 100-year-old clay pipes that strain under the pressure of the population.
Damaged sewer lines can cause sewage to back up into basements and flood homes like torches.
Sanitation problems aren't going unnoticed by policymakers.
Mount Vernon for example recently
received an unprecedented 150M$ in state funding to overhaul its sewer system.
And through the bipartisan infrastructure law,
new federal funds are available for wastewater infrastructure improvements.
The Biden administration has promised that disadvantaged communities will get their
fair share of the funds and recently set aside 154M$ for native American tribes.
We don't yet know whether these investments will be enough to close the gap in sanitation conditions.
A gap created through a long history of racist policies and funding shortages.
But what we do know is that a basic and critical service that most of us take for granted
is something more than a million Americans are still fighting for.